Visceral in the sense of strongly worded, rather than relating to the bits of viscera which fly out under the pressure of an alien's claws. Generally, the critical response has been an enthusiastic demonstration of the principle that bad reviews are a lot more fun to write than good reviews, leading to some tour de force eviscerations. That's evisceration in the sense of a savage review, not what happens when... oh, you get the drift.

The problem of Aliens

Plenty of technical reasons have been given for the review scores the game is getting, but it seems to me that there is a fundamental issue at the heart of the project. Despite its apparent aesthetic compatibility, Aliens is not a world which lends itself to a modern big-name FPS treatment.

The modern big-name FPS is primarily about creating a fairly linear path through a narrative, and then using that drop in flexibility to add polish and spectacle - layer upon layer of polish and spectacle. That often leads to the description of franchises like Call of Duty as "cinematic" - with positive and negative implications. However, it is actually more accurately "action movie-esque" - informed and inspired by a particular kind of cinema, in which a hero protagonist fights his (or her, but usually his) way through waves of enemies to reach a final confrontation with the antagonist. The odds against the hero escalate as he reaches his goal, and the force of his responses escalates in turn.

There is what my colleague Erik Kain identifies as a ludonarrative dissonance at times in the presentation of these games: the narrative may tell you that your character is on the back foot (often as a result of a crash-landed spaceship or drop-pod, which also explains why, despite being part of a mass military force, your space marine often finds himself acting alone or with a small group of companions), but the gameplay is still resolutely progressive: your character kills his way from objective to objective.

This is the rough model for a number of action films - in particular, it's a style that works very well with an Arnold Schwarzenegger type in the central role. The traditional FPS is actually a lot like The Terminator, but from the terminator's perspective - a single, incredibly durable hero cutting through numerous but weak enemies in pursuit of a single significant kill.

Aliens, also a James Cameron film, is a great action movie. But it isn't that great action movie. The heroes do not use their superior skills and durability to kill their way through waves of aliens. The heroes die, and run, and die.

The ends of empire

James Cameron has listed among the inspirations for Aliens the Vietnam war - in which an overconfident, technologically superior force is caught unawares by assymetric warfare.

Leaving aside the disquieting implications there, this is somewhat true, but also somewhat limited. The marines are not being sent in to prevent the expansion of an ideology, except in a very abstract sense. An outpost of Weyland-Yutani's holdings has stopped reporting and the marines are explicitly being sent in to resolve this administrative and financial issue - although we discover that the corporation has a darker purpose, as sci-fi corporations always do.

The marines are explicitly identified as colonial - and it is also made clear that they are in an uncomfortable relationship with the Weyland-Yutani corporation which, not unlike the East India Company, protects and mercantilizes the colonies, and seeks to profit from the raw materials they produce - including perfectly-constructed biological weapons. The US Colonial Marine corps are a nation-state's military serving the interests of a corporation.

A stand-up fight: Aliens: Colonial Marines

These marines are well-equipped, and they are confident - the reference to "another bug hunt" suggests that they have exterminated infestations before. However, the aliens they encounter on Hadley's Hope rapidly and totally subvert their expectations. In the first encounter their command structure is dismantled, cadre discipline breaks down completely and most of their advanced technology is lost or shown to be inadequate. Subsequent encounters whittle down their numbers further, while never doing more than lightly trimming the alien horde. Rather than advancing towards a goal, they are falling back towards a retreat, and are frustrated at every turn, infiltrated at every redoubt.

Meanwhile, the embodiments of their military virtues (Master Sergeant Apone and Lieutenant Gorman) and the corporate interests which built the colony (Carter Burke) are shown to be unprepared, inadequate or just downright evil. Gorman redeems himself after his catastrophic but inevitable failure first by shedding his unearned authority ("I just want to help"), and then by defying the rules of engagement by becoming a suicide bomber. By doing that, he wins the grudging (and very brief) respect of the hard-nosed Vasquez - the marine who has survived the longest through an unswerving commitment to being totally kick-ass.

If you want to keep surviving, you need to get out from under your colonial marine expectations very quickly. Corporal Hicks makes it to the finishing post primarily because he understands that standard-issue badassery is not an appropriate response to the situation, and calmly adjusts his parameters, falling in line with Ripley. Newt and Bishop survive because they are pacifists - she is wily, he is calm, but neither fights. And Ripley survives because she's Ripley - and because she is consistently suspicious of both the military and the corporate/colonial authorities. The final battle involves blue-collar technology - technology used to build rather than destroy - going up against the Alien Queen to protect the helpless Newt, Hicks and Bishop.

See the problem?

If you are trying to make a modern FPS set in the world of Aliens, this is going to cause immediate problems - and if it's squad-based, to paraphrase Morrissey, that makes it even worse. Modern FPSes are, somewhat predictably, based around the gun - the focus of the player's interaction with the world. You, the player, see the world through crosshairs. When you are deprived of a weapon, as in one section of Aliens: Colonial Marines, at the beginning of Half-Life 2 and during a harrowing in-game sequence in Quake 4, it is for a specific purpose - to create a temporary sense of helplessness.

This is not exactly rocket surgery. But it is a problem, because one thing we realise pretty early on in Aliens the movie is that the shiniest technology is not very much use against an enemy that emerges from the walls, or pulls you down through the floor.

So, to make that work the Aliens have to be nerfed a little. To make it worth the player's while to shoot, they have to become easier targets, and less numerous. To make melee work they have to be less acidic, and also less deadly at close quarters, where no marine stood against them unscathed. At a certain point, the sense of dread - the sense that nothing you have been equipped or trained to do works - is going to be diluted.